Can your technical people talk to your money people?

Special challenges await technical presenters who must address their less technically-minded counterparts. In this first part, David outlines the four major challenges technical presenters face and he begins to outline tips for overcoming those challenges.

Why Bad PowerPoint Visuals Happen and How to Make Them Better

Special challenges await technical presenters who must address their less technically-minded counterparts. In this second part, David highlights a major cause of bad PowerPoint visuals—espeically the kinds of bad visuals that frequently plague more technical presentations face. He also offers a simple technique for avoiding this common cause of bad PowerPoint visuals.

This four-part series considers the four biggest challenges facing presenters who make highly technical, detail or data-driven presentations. It’s true that these pitfalls await any unsuspecting presenter regardless of the presentation’s content and focus. But the dry abstraction inherent to more technical presentations adds to the obstacles. Luckily, these obstacles help remind us of opportunities to become even better communicators.

This four-part series considers the four biggest challenges facing presenters who make highly technical, detail or data-driven presentations. It’s true that these pitfalls await any unsuspecting presenter regardless of the presentation’s content and focus. But the dry abstraction inherent to more technical presentations adds to the obstacles. Luckily, these obstacles help remind us of opportunities to become even better communicators.

We posted about a challenge each week. Here’s the first one…

Technology has made us lousy listeners.

We've become lousy listeners. Technology—especially smartphones, tablets, etc—puts worlds of distractions in front of us wherever we are. And email, text messaging and social networks all but command our attention at any time and place.

Consider:

If we’re both looking at the same slide and I can read it twice as fast as you’re reading it to me, I can blow through that slide, update my Facebook status, reply to an email or two, and Google that whatsit that just came to mind — all before the first bullet on your next slide.

If your presentation to me gets too deep into details and data I know I’ve got in a PDF whitepaper on the topic, I might as well start keyword-searching through that — if you’re lucky — else, there’s probably another email or two I can knock out.

And so on…

Worst. Listener. Ever. Sure, I’m your worst nightmare for an audience. But don’t dismiss my lousy listening without first considering the possibility that you helped make me that way. At least admit you gave me some pretty good reasons toshare my focus.

More importantly, all of this suggests some things we can do as presenters to avoid the problems of lousy listening. And if our content is filled with technical specifications, detailed data, and analysis — we must do all we can to earn the attention of our audience and to keep it.

Yes, of course, present with passion and energy. Yes, make eye contact when presenting in person. Check in with your audience when presenting online or by phone. But also:

Let’s be mindful of the fact that people have always been lousy listeners — and there are now even more compelling distractions. Even worse, sometimes our lousy listening feels justified — or at least not without reason.

So, it’s as important as ever to hone your message and deliver your presentation to captivate me. But it’s even more important than ever not to justify my lousy listening habits.

Be sure your presentation makes good use of “now” and “later” piles. Most of the research, details, and comprehensive analysis leading up to and fueling your presentation is very important, no doubt. But how much of it is crucial to present right here, right now? It can be very helpful to really pare down to the now nut. Then save the rest of that rich, detailed information in your later pile.

Put it in a follow-up document, make it available for your audience to comb through later if they’d like, put it in an appendix in your slide deck — or in the “Notes” section. I don’t doubt that it’s all good, but I suspect it’s not all needed now.

Next time we’ll consider the second key challenge technical presenters face: too often, technical presenters use bad visuals that can make a presentation worse than no visuals at all.

ZEHREN♦FRIEDMAN can help your data denizens and science sleuths be more effective communicators with a presentation skills seminar designed specifically for technical presenters: Helping Techs Talk to Mere Mortals is a two-day, highly experiential, hands-on seminar for six to ten people.

This four-part series considers the four biggest challenges facing presenters who make highly technical, detail or data-driven presentations. It’s true that these pitfalls await any unsuspecting presenter regardless of the presentation’s content and focus. But the dry abstraction inherent to more technical presentations adds to the obstacles. Luckily, these obstacles help remind us of opportunities to become even better communicators.

We posted about a challenge each week. Challenge #1 discussed “Lousy Listeners”. Here’s the second one...

Technical Presenters Often Use Visuals That Make Their Presentations Worse.

Wait! Stop! Before firing off that deck of slides, did you ask: Are any of those visuals really necessary? Will they help me get my message into the hearts and minds of my audience? Or are they just there to make me feel better?

Many presenters — technical or not — use visuals that make a presentation worse. It’s true that great visuals make presentations more powerful, more effective, and more fun. Duh. But we often overlook the fact that bad visuals can actually hurt a presentation.

Bad visuals are like a like a third wheel on a date. They’re like that unhelpful extra ingredient on an episode of Top Chef (eg, “Why foam, why now?”) — Not only can it keep you from serving up a successful dish (ie, presentation), it can also get you kicked off the show (ie, lose your audience).

Technical presenters stand to gain the most from great visuals, but stand to lose the most from lousy visuals. Often, tech’s must present the results of highly detailed and nuanced work to non-technical counterparts. Numbers and data (and physics) may make the world go ‘round, but not without money, buy-in and the people who help procure and direct funding — who are often less technically inclined. Nothing less than art is required to successfully bridge scientists and suits. It’s not a matter of whether one more data point is squeezed onto an already-overloaded model. It’s not the shades of blue or the number of kitschy clip art icons and logos. It’s not whether the diagram (or cocktail napkin) islabelled 18 feet or 18 inches. It’s about whether communication occurs: Are you getting the message in your heart and mind into the hearts and minds of your audience?

We all know that visuals can be important to presentations and that slides are often lame. There’s no shortage of information and rules about good visuals. A few memorable examples include: the 6x6 rule, the 10/20/30 rule, and my personal favorites: the billboard test, and the self-explanatory one-idea-per-slide rule. Studies affirm our basic intuitions that words + visuals help us remember things more effectively. Yet, precious little is ever said about stopping that little cursor arrow before it launches PowerPoint (or the like) and asking two simple questions: 1) What visuals do I need to make this presentation most effective; and 2) Do I need any visuals at all?

Bad visuals are like a third wheel tagging along on the presenter’s date with an audience. And if the visuals are bad enough, they’re more like that distractingly attractive “friend” who just might steal your date.

We often treat slides as that thing that should probably go with my presentation. The visuals themselves are often an afterthought. And sometimes we just create the whole presentation — start-to-finish — in PowerPoint or Keynote (afterall, “we’re going to have to make slides at some point anyways”). Sometimes “visuals” are just cue cards for the presenter to read to the unfortunate audience. And we rarely — if ever — question whether we might do just as well — or better! — to go it without any visuals at all. Here then are just a few of the perils visuals present.

Peril #1: Time

Visuals — good, great, or lousy — take time to produce. Even if you have the luxury (or good sense) not to make your own visuals, it takes time to think them through and convey to someone else. Presenters who don’t make time to properly prepare a presentation aren’t likely to put much time into visuals either; the resulting visuals are often lousy. Given the choice, most audience members would much prefer a presentation without any visuals given by a presenter who’s better prepared than a presentation given by an unprepared presenter, albeit, with some visuals.

There’s also a different kind of time-related risk with visuals during the presentation: the timing and flow of the presentation. If you’ve taken the time to make visuals, you’re darn well going to use them in your presentation, right? And it doesn’t really matter whether those visuals are spot-on or vaguely-kinda-sorta-in-the-ballpark. So, it also doesn’t matter whether those visuals fit (much less help) your presentation flow. You’re stuck with them and whatever pace they impose on you. If the visuals were prepared in a hurry, you probably don’t really know what’s coming next. You’re not driving the show anymore, your visuals are leading both you and the audience.

Peril #2: Attention

One major reason to use visuals in a presentation is to help your audience focus-in on your message, on what you’re saying. One way a great visual does this is by momentarily grabbing attention to highlight a clear, succinct point that then quickly draws attention back to you, the presenter. But notice that, by its very nature, the visual grabs the attention of your audience — away from you. For a moment, you are intentionally providing your audience with something to focus on that is not you. That’s great when the moment is short and when it comes with some sort of payoff that ultimately (and quickly) puts more attentive focus on you. But the dangers are many.

As presenters, we work hard to get and keep the attention of an audience. Every time we put up a new visual, we invite our audience to leave us. When things go well, they come back, maybe even more attentive than before. But if that visual is not so great or we, as presenters, overestimate the power of our charismatic charms to reel-back our audience — Here’s where any PowerPoint pitfalls we fell into will come to roost. Here there be dragons.

Peril #3: Personality Suck

Not everyone befits the moniker “most interesting person in the world”, but most people with even a whiff of confidence have enough personality to keep my attention for at least a little while — especially when in their element. Yet, one of the remarkable properties of bad visuals, generally, and PowerPoint slides, in particular, is the ability to completely suck the life — and personality — out of a presenter (and an audience) in one fell blow.

Gone: the dynamism, the eye contact, the personal engagement, the wink, the smile, the confidence.

Yet, take away the obligatory visuals, and ask the same presenters to speak for a few minutes about what it is they came to say and, all of sudden, you’re in the presence of real, live humans again. Amazing.

An Anecdote

A good friend of mine happens to be a partner at a big law firm. He has the unenviable task of lining up monthly sessions designed to help less experienced lawyers at the firm gain perspective, knowledge, and chops. Of course, lawyers must often relate broad factual circumstances to detailed, specific case law and statutes. Success often depends upon an attention to detail that is sometimes legendary (or laughable). So, although, these sessions are generally not filled with detailed numbers and data, they are given by – and to – folks whose work more frequently deals in detail than in fun frivolity. Over some years, he’s seen a lot of these sessions. He says that inevitably the most compelling, most memorable, and, of course, most successful presentations were presented without any visuals or slides. Just a well-prepared, knowledgeable presenter with a good topic, and an audience.

Who knows, maybe with some really great visuals, those presentations might become even better. But suffice it to say that some smart people are making memorable presentations without any visuals or slides. Indeed, the audience at one of the largest law firms around likes them better that way.

I know, I know. You’re presentation isn’t a presentation without visuals. Fine. I understand. You’re probably right. And there’s no doubt that great visuals can certainly make a good presentation much better. But even decent visuals can spell trouble for the unwary presenter. So be wary, beware! and use visuals that help more than harm.

If bad visuals are like a third wheel on a date, great visuals are kind of like the proverbial “fifth Beatle”. I sometimes think of a presentation as a kind of performance that features: (1) a presenter; (2) the content/subject matter; (3) the setting/context; and (4) an audience. Since visuals can be dangerous and some great presentations don’t use any, I sometimes lump them in as part of “the content/subject matter”. But great visuals make presentations better, so they do deserve more official mention. Enter, the fifth Beatle: (5) the visuals.

Who knows how far the Beatles would’ve gone without, eg, George Martin or Brian Epstein. Perhaps, we would never have even noticed the Fab Four—never have heard the music they made—without the efforts, energy and polish of that fifth factor. So, too, effective visuals can make the all the difference.

So, what are great visuals and how do we get more of them into our presentations?

I think of a great visual as: an image that makes a maximum amount of relevant impact on a viewer using a minimum quantity of irrelevant content.

The whole point of a visual is to grab a viewer’s attention. As presenters, we don’t want the attention to go away from us for long. Yet, if sharing the attention of our audience means our point is made more memorable, our presentation more powerful, or our audience returns to us more receptive and attentive than before, then it’s worth sharing the stage with a visual.

We must be sure to get the most benefit from our visual and minimize the risk of losing our audience. So, it’s essential that the visual is highly relevant — not just to the presentation topic generally, but to the point we’re making in that very moment. And, of course, if the visual takes our audience more than an instant to capture and process, the risk of losing them, at least in that moment, increases exponentially. A visual that highlights, underscores, or otherwise enhances our point is easier to capture and process; relevance is a start. Eliminating irrelevant content as much as possible helps even more.

This is why I like the billboard test so much. If your audience can capture and comprehend your slide within the kind of brief time and glancing view a billboard typically gets, it passes the test.

Visuals that pass the billboard test simultaneously avoid many PowerPoint pitfalls and sins while displaying many of the essential features great visuals often share. For example, excessive words or convoluted montages of images fall out right away. Contrast between the text and the background—readability—gets well-deserved focus. The priority (or lack thereof) of the words and images becomes clearer. Low resolution images that are too fuzzy and out of focus to see sharply and process quickly are seen for the detriment they are. High resolution clip art images that display their cuteness as crisp and sharp as their irrelevance don’t hold up for long under the billboard test.

The billboards we drive by or walk by are wonderful daily reminders of how much a simple visual can convey very quickly and clearly—even to an audience whose attention is actively elsewhere. They are a terrific source of inspiration and guidance for our presentation visuals. When our visuals hold up to the standards of an average billboard, we know we’ve avoided many of the problems that frequently plague presentation visuals and we’ve employed some of the best of the best practices as well.

A few years ago, Apple Computer and Apple Corps got it together and released the Beatles on iTunes. Iconic images of the Beatles plastered billboards announcing the breakthrough. I always thought the fifth Beatle was George Martin. Paul says it was Brian Epstein. But it really doesn’t matter for our purposes. Besides, I’d have to figure out what part of a presentation gets to be John, Paul, George, or Ringo too. We’ll leave that for later. The point here is that the Beatles were quite talented as a group of four musicians (despite Decca and put on a good show. But it’s the fifth Beatle that made them what we know as “The Beatles”. George Martin’s savvy production and arrangements took some really good songs and made them legendary. Brian Epstein helped the Beatles gain the polish, brand, and, most importantly, look without which they might never have captured our attention in the first place.

If you’ve been following this thread of posts, we first talked about the fact that bad visuals can make a presentation worse and then looked at why visuals can be dangerous. This post concedes that presentations with great visuals are often the best — and suggests that the billboard test helps make sure our visuals are great. But great visuals don’t exist in a vacuum and many bad visuals got that way for a reason that is almost as innocent as it is understandable: the same set of visuals is asked to serve two very different audiences for two very different purposes. So, the last post in this series looks at what that reason is and suggests some simple ways to take a sad slide and make it better.

Okay, visuals are perilous, bad visuals hurt presentations, and great visuals can make a great presentation much better. So, why do bad visuals happen so often? No doubt, some presenters just don’t know any better — there are cures for that. And some presenters are perennially unprepared: The worst visuals often accompany the least prepared presenters. Presenters who don’t find time to prepare aren’t likely to make time to develop good visuals either. Worse yet, unprepared presenters are more likely to have visual “cue cards.” It’s bad enough to read to an audience. But when the audience sees what the presenter’s reading to them, it’s even more painful.

There’s another big—perhaps, more understandable—reason why presenters generally, and tech presenters specifically, create bad visuals: the same visuals must often serve two very different audiences. Many presentations are first given to alive audience with the helpful guidance of a real-time presenter. Often those same presentations—or at least the slides—are sent out and left to stand alone without the presenter’s personalized explanations.

Most visuals that are clean, clear and concise enough to best serve a live presentation don’t contain enough connective content and depth to make sense as a standalone piece. In fact, those dreadful “cue card” slides almost start to make sense in the context of a slide presentation that must go forth into the world without a handler, I mean, presenter.

Very similar symptoms and results occur with highly detailed presentations where the visuals (often charts, graphs or diagrams) are over-packed, every nuance labeled or color-coded to anticipate the full panoply of questions, objections and interests an audience might present. Here, the visual might appear live or as a standalone. In both cases, it’s expected to serve all conceivable audience members in one fell swoop—rather than to present the presenter’s point as clearly and simply as possible.

Earlier, I extolled the virtues of the billboard test, specifically because it forces us to cut out all the extra stuff. It lets us know our audience can scan our visuals quickly and just as quickly come back to us. But there is no us when our slide deck gets sent ahead without us. “Just send me your deck, we can talk about it later.” Sound familiar?

We all know how often this happens. So, being smart, proactive, efficient presenters, we prepare our deck with that inevitability in mind. Suddenly, poof! Gone the nice, uncluttered visuals. Gone all care for the billboard test, 6x6 rule, etc. Soon all that really matters is packing the deck with as much data and labeling and commentary as possible to let it stand alone for individual readers. That is to say that the deck is packed well enough to render the presenter optional. In a future post, we’ll have to talk about all the many alarm bells that should go off there. But for now, let’s just look at the damage this does to our presentation visuals.

Visuals designed to help individual readers often make the live presentation downright awful. I don’t know what’s more offensive: to give an audience visuals that replicate all that we’re saying or expecting them not to notice that they don’t need us to read to them. And yet, in many cases all the informational content itself is good—important even. Presumably, it’s the very reason the presenter creates the presentation and accompanying visuals in the first place. With “cue card” slides, we fault the redundancy problems between the slide and what the presenter says because it’s unhelpfully duplicative. That is not because of the substance of what’s actually communicated.

So, too, with overly detailed charts or diagrams. It’s not that there isn’t some relevance, importance or intrigue to all of that intricate detail. It’s just that only some small subset of it can be communicated simply and clearly at any given moment — especially where the presenter is a technician and the audience is comprised of mere mortals.

Fortunately, there are some fairly easy things we can do to avoid these problems without ignoring the double-lives most of our presentations must often live.

Ironically, PowerPoint, the software most of us still use to create presentation visuals, has included one solution to the problem that dates back almost to its inception (ie, back when it was “Presenter” and only ran on a Mac): the Notes pane. The whole reason for a Notes pane is to have a place for all that fulsome, non-visual information. The stuff that’s important enough to note but not necessarily display on any given slide. Ostensibly, the Notes pane is the perfect place for all the connective content and narrative to go so that it’s tied to the slide, but not imposing itself on the visual.

Unfortunately, the Notes pane is a pain to use. True, there are lots of articles that explain how to get just about any content you want into the Notes pane. There are just as many on how to print handouts that display the visual together with the notes on a page. Cliff Atkinson’s “Beyond Bullet Points” did as good a job as any advocating for this type of a workflow. But all that explaining and how-to-ing shows just how unhelpful and underdeveloped the Notes functionality remains. Over the years, Microsoft has given us helper doodads, ribbon thingys and automatic formatting whatsits that have probably kept the balance of pain and progress (though not the bloat) in stasis. But the Notes pane, that seemingly perfect place for all that important content and information stuff, hasn’t received much love and attention.

A Note to Future Users + An Appendix

David Zehren suggests that presenters include a slide with a note to future users at the beginning of the deck and add an appendix of slides at the end. The note to future users explains that the deck contains a deck of slides intended for live presentation by a presenter that is followed by an appendix of slides with more detailed information. The slides in the deck then refer (by slide number) to the corresponding slide(s) in the appendix; slides in the appendix refer back as well.

This approach provides a place where more detailed information of any kind (more text, more diagrams, etc) can go within the same deck of slides. The less detailed slides refer directly to/from the more detailed slides. This is useful and user-friendly for individual readers viewing the standalone deck. It also provides an easy way for a live presenter to take an audience on a deeper dive when necessary without weighing down the intended focus when it’s not needed. Of course, jumping back and forth is easy in a slideshow (ie, just type the slide number and hit “enter”).

Vox Humana

Maybe it’s the musician in me, but I’ve always wondered why the “narration” feature of presentation software is so underutilized. Including a voice (or even video) recording with the presentation seems like the closest possible approximation of including the presenter with the deck. Maybe it’s too close. Before I even knew that people sent slide decks to each other, I recorded slide narrations so I could see what my visual looked like and hear what I was saying while it displayed. I always felt like you can’t really hear what you’re saying while you’re saying it. It also helped me sort out pacing and timing. In the end I always had a relatively self-contained presentation as well. Nearly all computers come with built-in mic’s (and even front-facing cameras) now. Yet few folks seem to even know about recording narrations for slides; far fewer yet ever play with it. That still surprises me.

A Pound of Prevention

It is incumbent upon presenters of detailed, complicated content of any kind to continually seek ways to simplify and break the information down into more manageable portions. That’s true for live presentations with a presenter present, phone presentations, webinars, and standalone slide decks. Sometimes the problem is not a matter of finding someplace for all that additional detail and content to go. It’s about breaking it down further into simpler parts. Maybe it’s less time spent across more slides, or more time spent on one really clear, well-designed visual rather than lots of half-baked sort-of’s, or taking time to develop a story, anecdote, or analogy that requires no visual at all. The more simplification and clarity we give our content and our visuals, the less stuff we have to shoehorn into a standalone deck or onto a poor, defenseless visual, or into the hearts and minds of our audience.

Try to bring enough content to fill about half of the time you’ve been given

Deliver with confidence:

Eye contact if possibly the most important skill. Look at the whole audience, one person at a time

Be loud (always start louder than what you think is appropriate)

There is no substitute for passion—your audience will never become more excited about your ideas that you are—push beyond your comfort zone because your natural inhibitions will never allow you to go too far

Create / Use visuals effectively:

Don’t waste the headline—have it say the most important thing on the slide

Where possible emphasize graphics, not words (people will remember the graphic and then recall the content)

Big and bold—you never want to say “I know this is too small, but it shows…”

Control the flow of information—put up a slide full of “stuff” and you’ll lose audience attention as they read while you talk

If you need a handout, create two decks; one to present off of and one to give as a leave behind. Start with the later and create your presentation deck by editing it way, way down. Put in a monster appendix if you must

Handling Questions and Answers:

Part of Q&A is determining how you want to handle questions; do you want to be interrupted as you go along, or have questions at the end—announce how you’d like the audience to ask questions during the “Greeting and Rapport” part of the presentation

Don’t just anticipate the questions you’ll hear, determine what the best answer ought to be. If you think, by the way, that you’ll definitely get a specific question, determine whether or not you want the answer in the presentation

Listen to the question—with your ears and your eyes!

Ask a question of the questioner if their question is unclear, or if the answer is so broad that it will take another presentation to answer. Ask, “Can you give me that again,” or “Tell me what the core issue is?”

If the group is large, say more than 15 people and there is the chance that everyone didn’t hear the question (or you need to buy yourself some thinking time), repeat or rephrase the question

Answer to the group! The fastest way to lose control of the group or generate side conversations, or endless cell phone fidgeting is to focus your eye contact on the person who asked you the question. You’re telling the rest of the group you’re involved in a deep, one-on-one conversation and they can amuse themselves. You presented to the group, so Q&A is an extension of the presentation

Do I Lecture or Facilitate?

Both have their places. Attachments 3 & 4 were in the materials I gave you the last time we were together, but the reminder is valuable. You need to determine what the best way to get the message across is. Both lecture and facilitation have pluses and minuses. Either choice you make demands that you create a plan. You get to decide how the room is set up, whether you need colleagues to run the meeting with you, etc.

Guidelines for Team Presentations:

Design

Determine objective—no different than any other presentation

Assign parts (open, body, close)—determine who will design each part

Organize content and visuals using an agreed upon template

Set milestone dates (managed by someone on the team)

Delivery

Eye contact of non-presenters is always on the presenter! You teach the audience how to behave with your behavior

Determine how to hand-off the presentation between presenters

Handling Q&A—have one person moderate and hand the question off to one of the team—or have team members volunteer—then the designated person hands off the question

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